Thursday, September 8, 2011

Who do you serve?

{my article published at NothingButSharePoint.com – Sept 22, 2011}

One of my good friends from college recently started an organization that provides a mobile produce store for communities in Chicago’s West Side who don’t have access to fresh produce. They’re meeting a huge need in those communities, and they’re serving the People in a great way.

As SharePoint professionals, who do we serve? SharePoint isn’t exactly available on the corner of every urban neighborhood in America. [yet?] : )  So, who is it that benefits from the skills, experience, and assistance of a great SharePoint’er?

One might say we serve ‘Big Business’. SharePoint is certainly animage enterprise server product, and the main consumer of that type of product is the large corporation. If this is who we serve, we certainly serve them well, as SharePoint has been proven to be a strategic advantage, cost-saver, and effective collaboration platform for many large companies.

Or, maybe we serve the corporate Developer? Have you ever seen the smile on the face of a .NET developer after you teach them about the benefits of developing on the SharePoint 2010 platform? : )  When leveraged properly, SharePoint certainly opens up a world of advantages for the .NET dev team trying to create collaboration solutions for their company.

Ultimately, tho, I’d like to think we serve the millions of Information Workers out there who use SharePoint on a daily basis. At the end of the day, that’s who our SharePoint solutions are for, and if I can make just one Information Worker come to work with a smile and expectation that they’ll have a productive day because of SharePoint, then it’s all worth it. : )

As we look toward the future, I would like to think we’ll also be serving the entrepreneur who has a small shop using SharePoint Online. As the cloud continues to provide scalable and cost-effective options for small & medium business, perhaps the dream of SharePoint on every neighborhood corner could be closer than we think.

I’d be interested in your thoughts – as a SharePoint professional, who do you serve?